Miss Marketing

Yes Mom, yes Dad. Facebook does “Rule”. It’s super fun to see hundreds of pictures of your kids in one click and find out how that nice boy who used to go to grade 3 with your daughter is doing. It’s exhilarating to suddenly know every time your child has a hangover or is tagged in a picture where their skirt is too short and their top too low.

But Facebook parenting is a privilege not a right, and with this new social universe comes a whole new system of rules of etiquette that are too often ignored. For parents who use Facebook to correct grammar, reprimand, and ground their children there are consequences, but even a well meaning, but misplaced, “lol” can cause major problems. If you screw things up not only can you get put on limited profile, when your access is restricted so you can only see a portion of a Facebook page (and it’s never the good parts), but they will also tell all their siblings and childhood friends to ignore your friend requests so you never get to see anything at all. Sad faces.

Of course, there are good reasons you might want to ignore the unofficial ‘age-limit’ and venture into the facebook-o-sphere. Maybe you want to track your troubled teen or see the latest pictures of your grand-baby, or connect with your estranged cousin. I am a firm believer that as long as a health attitude of intrepidation and respect is taken to entering the Facebook universe as a parent, young and old can happily coincide in the same Facebook universe.

So when I recently got the inevitable email from my mother saying:

Miss Marketing’s Guide to Flawless Facebook Etiquette

That’s it! Pretty easy eh? Now you too can amaze and thrill your children with your Facebook know-how and I guarantee they will be appreciative. Careful coherence can result in unfettered access to photos and walls, friend requests from your other children and maybe even their friends!

I believe you can do it, I believe we can make this work, I believe all we need is a little guidance. So just as I told my mother:

So firstly I want to thank everyone who read my last post, it was so amazing to see something that I find inspiring touch so many people. Last week over 400 people read my post “On Dance in Advertising” about the incredible Kate Jablonski and the role of art in advertising, I couldn’t be more thrilled. And while I’m a little worried that I’ve screwed myself by writing a post I’ll never be able to top I want to introduce this next post with one last dance video as a post-Valentine’s Day love song to all of my readers (occasional or permanent) through the voice of Kate Jablonski:

On a bit of a similar note I have been thinking a lot about perceptions in advertising. I think it’s something we all struggle with personally and for the things we create. How do you get people to see you or your company for what it really truly is? For most companies the goal of their advertising/marketing campaigns is to create the image of a company that is cool, sleek, reliable and professional. But how do you let people know that you also have a soul? Nobody wants to pay thousands of dollars to produce one of those ads you see on the subway that look like it was done with stock-photos and Paint, but somehow they often feel more honest. It seems to me that advertising for companies is either cringe-worthy but makes your company look small and non-threatening, or is “good” but makes you look like a massive corporation with an unlimited budget and no soul.

So what if you’re somewhere in between?

What if you want people to understand that you’re small and broke but also reliable, organized, and professional? As a not-for-profit patient group, the struggle with misadvertising is a daily one. You want a website that looks professional and sleek so that people will have faith in the organization and want to interact with your social media. But along with their trust you get the assumption that you have unlimited funds and an office building made of gold filled with well dressed employees just waiting to leap at their every beckon call. It’s not malicious, everyone’s just confused.

We’ve been taught that there are two kinds of companies in this world; big, capable, and soulless, or small, passionate and crappy. And it doesn’t help that every big company is trying to convince you that they really have the soul of a small company, trapped within their multimillion dollar walls.

I think that part of the problem is that big companies are eager to give the impression that they are flawless. They bury their failures and their scandals even if they were honest mistakes handled with integrity and finesse, and promote their awards, smiling employees and generous donations. The insincerity of it all quickly leads people to suspicion and skepticism. We know that good always comes with bad, and it’s unnatural for any company or individual to operate without their share of scandals or mistakes.

And so the more they pretend the less we trust, and the more the small companies unabashedly present their flaws the more we trust them, even though anyone whose ever worked in the restaurant industry can tell you it’s the Ma and Pa’s, who operate without a corporate overlord, who use the weirdest meat, drop the most food and let you sit the least.

I think it’s time companies started helping us avoid these mental traps, after all it seems like all we really crave is the honesty and transparency of the local business with the clean floors and employment standards of the mega-corp. I’m really hoping we don’t have to abandon sleek advertising and high-standards in an attempt to reveal our souls. I’m going to start by adding a dose of transparency to our not-for-profit by changing our “About Us” page from a organized list of names and positions, to a series of chatty bios that clearly describe the hectic lives and many duties that each of our eleven volunteers try and juggle along with their not-for-profit work. Maybe it won’t solve all our problems, and it’s certainly going to rock the corporate sphere, but the more I think about it, the more I think that a picture of a sweaty Mom next to the title of ‘President’ might just be the key to making people think twice before they assume that they already know, who we really are.

I know I haven’t posted in blogosphere EONS and I was planning on doing a post reviewing the Superbowl Ads but it seems time has slipped away from me and lets face it, that’s not exactly the most original idea ever. Luckily for us all, I got a much better idea when I discovered that a dance choreographer, Kate Jablonski, who I have been following for a few years on YouTube has FINALLY been hired by a professional artist to choreograph her new music video.

Kate Jablonski is a dance god (no lie). She is by far the best choreographer I have ever seen (even better than the contemporary choreographer from So You Think You Can Dance, Mia Micheals, and that chick won an Emmy!). Oh yes, this is no exaggeration, and I’m not the only one who knows it. Kate has a school somewhere in the states where she turns often frighteningly young girls into black bandeau wearing dancing machines. For the past couple years she has been filming her league of skinny dancing ninjas performing incredibly moving and emotional contemporary routines to the lyrical music of charming British women (my favorite kind of music). Her videos are instantly recognizable by the perfectly synchronized blur of bendy white girls in black sports bras and short-shorts and the fact that you can’t watch just one (like Pringles!). Here, is one of her more recent videos to show you what I mean (ps. the song is by Laura Marling who is the one that asked Kate to do the dance for her next official music video. Clever girl!):

I know what you’re thinking “Incredible! Where do I find more right now?” YouTube. But wait! I promise more videos if you stick with me just a little longer. Because I am about to tie this into marketing/advertising.

I have a prediction, or a suggestion, or something of that nature. Long ago when I first started watching these videos I though to myself “Wow, it’s 3am and I have a paper due tomorrow, but instead I’m watching these videos on loop” and it occurred to me that this kind of dance is a very powerful thing. And people can feel it, a group of people doing something to music all at the same time is compelling stuff, just look through history and find me one culture that didn’t have some form of dance. Find me a flash mob of dancers that people can walk by without stopping to stare, find me a dance reality show with less than a million viewers. And yet, our music videos are filled with choppy shots of barely clothed “dancers” shaking their ass in time to the music or back-up dancers so hidden in the shadows you’re not even sure they’re there until it’s their turn to paw the back or lift the leg of the lip-syncing starlette.

The straight forward dance-focused filmography of Kate Jablonski’s videos wipe the layer of muck and debris from the face of dance as we know it and present it in it’s raw and extremely talented form. Her videos say clearly that dance is not for amateurs or enthusiastic hobbyists but an elite sport that requires years of training and innate skill to master. Her choreography is original, emotional, and gripping, and doesn’t ignore the lyrics, the rhythm or the melody of the music but pulls it all together in a dance so beautiful you can’t look away. It’s about damn time.

So why, I thought, why hasn’t this been taken advantage of? There is something qualitatively different about her style of dance (and by her style I mean the quality of the dancers, the choreography, the authenticity and the type of dance itself) that attracts the viewer in a powerful way. What else could an advertiser want? 30 seconds of witty banter about cell phones or 30 seconds of Kate Jablonski’s dancers twirling their hearts out in Nike bras. ‘Just do it?’ I think I would probably twirl my butt into my nearest Nike store pretty damn quickly.

I think that as advertising becomes more and more saturated the key is not to appeal to the lowest common denominator or do the same thing “better” but to look back to where it all began, back to art. Pure, moving, emotional, captivating art. The clean kind. Like Kate Jablonski and her skinny little dancers.

As promised, where it all began: